Category: Books
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Weekly Wanderings: August 30, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. 🎼 RIP Dolly Parton Rahawa Haile, “Dolly Parton Loved Being Dolly Parton” Tressie McMillan Cottom, “The Greatest Story Dolly Parton Ever Wrote Was Herself” John Nichols, “Dolly Parton Was a Proud Union Sister” Kathryn Schulz, “Dolly Parton for the People” Latest Writing I have a new Wall Street Journal…
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Weekly Wanderings: July 5, 2026
Semiquincentennial Edition Apple Pages doesn’t recognize “semiquincentennial” and keeps underlining it as misspelled. Not very patriotic, Apple. (Apparently Pages wants me to hyphenate the word, but that looks weird and pedantic so I’m keeping it [allegedly] misspelled.) After taking June off from posting, I’m easing back into things this week with a short list of…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 31, 2026
Don’t Try This at Home My book club is discussing Kiran Desai’s third novel, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, tomorrow night. The book is nearly 700 pages long—so when did I start reading it? Friday morning. 🙄 The past few days have been a throwback to graduate school, with me racing through the book…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 10, 2026
A few short updates to start: In late March, I wrote about the PWHL game I attended in Detroit and how enthusiastic the crowd was for the city to get its own women’s hockey team. That enthusiasm has now officially paid off, as the PWHL announced on Wednesday that a Detroit team will start playing…
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Weekly Wanderings: May 4, 2026
Back to the Archives Because my job is largely office-based and administrative, I don’t often have the opportunity to stretch the archival research muscles I trained in graduate school. But I’ve long had the idea of digging into the Association for Asian Studies (AAS) historical archives, which are held at the Bentley Historical Library—just a…
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Weekly Wanderings: March 1, 2026
Does anyone else feel like the first two months of 2026 have included enough activity and events for a whole year? I suspect I’m not the only one who has already maxed out. Let’s keep the chaos and upheaval to a minimum in March, hmmm? Thanks for joining me this week. New Goodreads Reviews This…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 16, 2026
I love to write book reviews. I find it incredibly enjoyable when I’m reading a book and feel something spark—an interesting bit of history, or a new perspective, or a wonderful turn of phrase—that makes me impatient to tell everyone else about what I’m reading. I get excited about a book and I want other…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 8, 2026
I have a new review at The Wall Street Journal, discussing a wonderful and very engaging book by journalist Yi-Ling Liu, The Wall Dancers: Searching for Freedom and Connection on the Chinese Internet. I’ve written a lot over the years about the Chinese Party-state’s imposition of internet controls, so it was a refreshing change to…
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Weekly Wanderings: February 1, 2026
Thanks for joining me this week. Recommendations China Stories The AI race is being waged with the top 1% of the 1% of talent in China; the rest of the 99.9% and the humanities majors have much less to look forward to. In the fourth and fifth-tier cities, one of most arresting problems in China…
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Bookshelf: Volga Blues
A current of tension runs throughout the chapters of Volga Blues: A Journey into the Heart of Russia. Sometimes it’s weak, and I forget that Italian journalist Marzio G. Mian and photographer Alessandro Cosmelli are traveling around Russia without authorization or the proper visas, posing instead as a historian and his friend. But then something…
Maura Elizabeth Cunningham 